I read among my preferred email newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the email and saw the beehiiv logo design for the first time. I clicked on it and immediately began tearing up. Beehiiv Newsletter Tutorial…
Being a permanent developer is difficult. I’m frequently getting pitched different tools and services that do not appear to be worth my time.
I think I was emotional due to the fact that I invested the last six months experimenting with various e-mail and e-newsletter platforms to aid construct my newsletter. And to be fair, there are some wonderful options for composing e-newsletters. However I could not locate one that made me offer a guaranteed “yes”.
The problem with lots of existing e-newsletter systems is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I desire a newsletter platform that lets me totally tailor my e-newsletter styles, makes it super easy to write and send emails, and provides me devices that assist me analyze metrics and obtain more subscribers.
I believe I have actually ultimately located the best device.
Yet, I know beehiiv might not be for everybody. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s in fact best for you.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one platform for e-newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it very easy to style, compose, send out, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your e-newsletter.
Created by previous staff members at the popular e-newsletter company Morning Brew, beehiiv aims to help makers launch and monetize their very own newsletter– taking great deals of growth principles from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this article, I’m mosting likely to explain my individual experience with beehiiv, the important things I like (and hate) regarding it, all of it’s features, and why I made a decision to lastly go with it as my newsletter platform of selection.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A couple of months earlier, I inadvertently came across beehiiv. The amusing story is that I have actually been on the lookout for a modern e-newsletter system for fairly time now. I have actually hesitated hard when it concerned finally introducing my newsletter.
Initially, I attempted Mailchimp. After that, a few other indie systems. Then, Substack. And ultimately, I ended up using beehiiv.
I’m sure many newsletter creators look up to prominent newsletters with countless subscribers– I know I do. The Morning Brew newsletter is one I respected a great deal. They have great web content, tons of subscribers, and a clever referral program that allows them to get even more customers.
So, I took place a search to figure out exactly how these large e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they make use of? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more subscribers? How do they develop a newsletter layout that remains on-brand?
When I uncovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to all of my inquiries. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that developed this device truly understand e-newsletter production and development.” I examined who these developers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the founders were some of the initial marketing and growth employees at Morning Brew– my mind took off.
I understood this was going to be a different newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on designer development.
Because, any designer knows, you need growth to be able to earn a living off of a newsletter. And locating the best newsletter pile (that scales) often implies using multiple various devices to aid accomplish one goal– one platform for your e-newsletter, one system to monetize, and one platform to set up recommendations. It can obtain pricey.
So when I found out beehiiv did all of these points in one platform, and it was complimentary to begin utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
beehiiv vs Substack
You could be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for writers called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a terrific platform used by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you get your very own web site and use the system as your all-in-one service for sending emails (while producing an archive of previous issues).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all the important things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, more design flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing clients to obtain the word out.
beehiiv additionally offers you a website similar to Substack. However, if you have your own web site already, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I use) to send your web site clients straight to your beehiiv email listing. On the very same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a tool like Revue to permit people to subscribe to your newsletter directly from Twitter.
This gives you the flexibility to take advantage of various marketing networks to get your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a wonderful Substack option.
How to start using beehiiv e-mail marketing software program.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content designer that desires a system that enables them to send customized e-newsletters with or without needing to have a web site.
One of the most successful e-newsletters have the right tools to develop and scale their e-newsletters. beehiiv aims at giving you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media firm, start-up, or web content designer, you must seriously thinking about checking out beehiiv. It’s entirely free to start and you just pay when you get to over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you really end up having to spend for beehiiv it’s possibly a good sign that people enjoy reading your things.
Enroll in a free plan
The initial step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Beginning trial” button on beehiiv’s site.
The free plan will permit you to have up to 2,500 clients, provide you accessibility to website hosting, a newsletter CMS, breakthrough personalization, analytics, outside embed kinds, and much more. It’s an extremely charitable offering for those just beginning (or for those searching for a new system to migrate to).
Onboarding
After developing an account, you’ll experience an onboarding procedure that will ask things like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other platforms have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying clients?”, and more.
You’ll then create a name and link for your e-newsletter’s internet site. On the free plan, your e-newsletter will live on a beehiiv subdomain. So if your e-newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your web site URL might be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
During the onboarding process, you’ll additionally choose your brand name colors and design to make sure your newsletter template looks right.
Browsing your dashboard
Once you reach your main dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have outlined details on the amount of sign-ups you’re obtaining and where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Begin composing”, “Blog posts”, “Target market”, “Grow”, “Monetize”, “Style” and” Assess”. And at the really lower you’ll see the setups option.
Dashboard is your major nerve center (screenshot over), Begin creating is where you develop and release e-newsletters, Blog posts is where you can see all of your previous newsletter editions, Target market is where you can see who your clients are (and damage them down right into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you design your e-newsletter landing page and blog post template, Examine is where you can see all your analytics, and Settings is where you can take care of every one of your admin stuff.
Creating your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start writing, with little to no friction. If you’re just beginning, and have a concept you intend to blog about, I advise just going to the “Create” section in the navbar and clicking on “Begin composing”.
You can tweak your template and styling later– concentrate on the material initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor provides a clean and user-friendly interface for composing.
Once you begin writing, you can optimize headings, include links, and style your content exactly how you like.
beehiiv gives you tons of alternatives for various types of content like video clips, web links, photos, and much more.
The team at beehiiv is likewise frequently launching product feature and updates so I’m sure there will be a lot more material features depending on when you read this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that’s ready to send, it’s time to design your e-mail template and adjust some setups.
Right here, you can update the name of your newsletter, offer it a summary, add your logo, turn on or off a welcome e-mail to first time subscribers, and a lot more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your layout.
You can modify background colors, borders, spacing, font styles, photo formats, and much more. I’m not going to undergo ever solitary point you can maximize with your e-mail template since it’s a lot. Just experiment with the system completely free and see it on your own!
Vital beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of remarkable features that make it an excellent publishing system for any e-newsletter developer.
Right here are a few of the essential features you can locate with beehiiv:.
Newsletter builder Beehiiv Newsletter Tutorial
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting system. It makes it incredibly simple to compose and send out e-mails. I pointed out above a few of the important things you can do with your setups and e-mail layout so I’ll save you some additional analysis.
Things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has an actually modern-day and minimalistic feeling. It’s certainly one of the better email editors I’ve ever before written in.
Site hosting
When you create a beehiiv newsletter, every one of your e-newsletters (if you desire) reside on a web site. Think about it as an internet site for your newsletter that’s a home to every one of your previous issues of your newsletter, and an area where people can sign up for your e-newsletter.
If you know with Substack, it’s virtually comparable to that.
All plans, including the free one, provide you a website. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you wish to add a personalized domain to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Obtaining clients is important. After all, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can subscribe to your e-newsletter directly from your beehiiv website or via embed kinds.
If you already have a site, and want people to register for your newsletter from your existing site, you’ll have to use an embed form. This is what I make use of on this internet site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right-hand man column of this blog post if you scroll up).
With embed types, you have 3 different choices– a complete width, a fixed width, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can locate the code snippet for these embeds in the “Subscribe Forms” tab in your setups.
There’s also an option for attribution monitoring if you intend to forward UTM parameters for tracking purposes– pretty neat.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I desire beehiiv had when it pertained to subscribe features. I’m sure the team is dealing with updates for these, however I discussed a couple of worries I had in the benefits and drawbacks area listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things regarding beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other newsletter system, is an option for producing a referral program.
You can motivate existing clients on your checklist to onward your e-mails to close friends and colleagues and if they obtain other individuals to register for your list, you can award them. These incentives can be in whatever kind you want. I have actually appear several newsletter companies provide incentives in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously turn your clients into a word of mouth growth engine for your newsletter– providing you one more method for expanding your e-mail checklist.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll need to update to a more premium plan. I’ll discuss all the plans later on in this write-up.
Premium memberships
They say all you need to earn a living online is 1,000 real fans. Membership earnings is absolutely a beast of its own. If you’re looking for a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can develop “costs” concerns of your e-newsletter that are only sent out to paying customers. This can be really profitable relying on what your newsletter has to use. For instance, Trends.co is a preferred premium newsletter that produces millions in income a year simply by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Information analytics
One of the things I like about beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You obtain real-time date on how your e-newsletter is doing, with open/click prices and customer matter.
You obtain accessibility to all the metrics you need to get a bird-eye view on how your e-newsletter is actually doing. Logging into your dashboard and seeing that subscriber matter go up is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv uses 4 various pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (free) Launch plan provides you everything you need to get going and expand your newsletter (up to 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 39/month) offers you every little thing in the Launch plan with the addition the advertisement network, referral program, personalized domain name, surveys, and access to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76/month) gives you whatever in the Grow plan with enhancement of priority assistance and eliminating the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are fairly generous in my opinion.
For example, if you have 100,000 customers you will pay around $329 each month. Instead of some rivals, like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), that would charge $679 each month for the same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit choice for numerous customers.
I’m uncertain how the unit economics service this, yet beehiiv is absolutely cheaper (currently) than what it can be.
beehiiv pros and cons
Of course, with every platform, it has its benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of the pros and cons I have actually directly experienced while using beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Below are several of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter platform of choice:
- Easy to establish and begin sending out e-newsletters totally free
- Clean and modern-day client analytics
- Lots of flexibility with email designs.
- Referral program feature Beehiiv Newsletter Tutorial
- Website hosting
- Produce costs alternatives to monetize
- Polls
To be honest, I haven’t seen another newsletter platform that has actually had the ability to package all of these features with each other so well.
But certainly, I don’t want to be prejudiced so I’m going to mention some cons.
Cons of using beehiiv
Below are some of the cons I’ve found while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and beehiiv
- Limitations around adding custom-made fonts
I use Webflow as my website building platform of choice (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to enter too much detail why I love Webflow a lot yet you can read my Webflow testimonial if you wish to discover more.
Today, there actually is no other method I can integrate beehiiv with my Webflow web site other than using an iframe embed. I directly don’t like utilizing iframe’s because they often tend to reduce my site a little bit. Each time a page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) lots, the sign-up embed is the last thing to load on the web page. It’s extremely visible when you’re on a slow web connection. However I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow kind (which I love making use of). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier but that would certainly simply include extra expenses that I do not need. To be straightforward, this is more of a Webflow con over a beehiiv disadvantage however I believed I would certainly discuss it.
Besides that, I still believe the pros far surpass the cons right here. I’m additionally confident that Webflow will at some point create a better way to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion
Generally, beehiiv is a wonderful solution for anyone aiming to study the world of e-mail marketing and newsletters.
The performance of this e-newsletter system far outweighs numerous that are presently on the market. And with a generous free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to lose for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively low-cost of what they are. Paying just $329/month to have 100,000 customers on your checklist is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it might cost you well into the thousands monthly.
Anyways, I don’t create evaluation messages typically. I just do when I really make use of the tool myself and would certainly recommend it to a good friend.
I hope you discovered some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is an excellent platform for you.